Chapter 38

Saoirse lies on her back in the darkness and counts the beats of her heart, mercifully alone. Once again, she has no idea how Emmit took leave of the chamber. When he’d finished, he incapacitated her with another chloroform-soaked rag. Saoirse thinks back over her many hours and conversations with him, wondering at what point she should have known he was a monster. At what point she should have run. She shouldn’t have gone with him to the coffee shop. She’d been right about him manipulating her to believe he’d thought she was stalking him. He’d had her in his sights all along. Maybe if she hadn’t gone to the career fair, it wouldn’t have been so easy for him. As it stands, she’s a fly who’s thrown herself onto his web.

Saoirse struggles to her feet and walks across the vast tunnel, turning the flashlight on every twenty steps to orient herself. She stops where the walls change from stone to concrete, then again when they shift to dirt. She examines the ground beneath the casket; the dirt she forced out of the wall is imperceptible. She looks back across the expanse of the catacomb, aiming the flashlight at the blanket Emmit left. That blanket is not quite the farthest point from where the catacomb meets the cemetery, but it’s close. If she did claw a hole through the dirt, it would take Emmit a while to notice. He might never notice. Until she escaped like Andy Dufresne beneath Shawshank Prison. She, too, could be gone like a fart in the wind. Saoirse swallows a manic laugh.

She turns the metal body over in her hand. What would be worse? To chip away the dirt with the flashlight and risk breaking it, or not dig at all? Even if she doesn’t use the flashlight as a battering ram, it will die eventually. She’ll dig, then. It’s decided.

You’re screwed no matter what, Jonathan whispers, like a worm in her ear. You dig, you won’t hear him coming. Even if he doesn’t catch you in the act, he’ll see you’re filthy. On the other hand, you don’t dig, you die down here anyway.

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Saoirse asks. She puts a hand to her chest, then pushes away the thought that the work will raise her heart rate as inevitably as Jonathan’s voice.

She falls into a monotonous routine: a hundred whacks with the flashlight’s head, a whispered prayer that she hasn’t knocked the filament loose or dented the battery compartment, then a press of its dirt-smeared rubber button. While light streams from its lens, she examines her progress, then kills the flashlight and starts the process over. After an unknown number of one-hundred-whack sets, she increases the number to five hundred, not wanting to wear out the battery.

The work is worse than she anticipated: endless motion with no immediate gain, shot through with the knowledge that her survival depended on digging upward through ten feet—or maybe more ... please, God, not more—of 150-year-old grave dirt, then—eventually, somehow—crawling up onto the flimsy casket and digging some more.

She sweats and curses. She screams and cries. She pauses to rest her heart and quell the stuttering of a brain that, more and more, feels the absence of its beta blockers and Paxil. She tears strips from the hem of her dress and wraps them around her hands, then tears another strip and wraps it around the handle of the flashlight. She rests with her back against the dirt wall. I will not doze off. I will not doze off. I will not doze—

She’s ripped from sleep by a scream that erupts through the catacomb, echoing around her like a surround sound. Saoirse fumbles for the flashlight as the scream comes again. She recognizes it. It’s the sound from her basement, the sound that interrupted her tarot reading. It’s an unearthly, tortured sound, poetry ripped straight from hell, and it mirrors the scream Saoirse’s heard in her own head since she woke up in this nightmare.

“Sarah?” Saoirse calls out, feeling less foolish than on the other times she called out to the former mistress of 88 Benefit Street. “Is that you?” Down here, where the idolatry of men’s genius is held above a woman’s right to live, the poet’s ghost may just appear. The beam of Saoirse’s flashlight roves over the walls, but the source of the scream does not appear. The next time the scream comes, it is far off, as if the screamer has moved to another chamber, dragging its pain. Its chains. Its secrets.

Saoirse forces her tired body across the catacomb, cleans herself as best she can with the underside of the blanket, then lays the blanket flat. She instructs her mind to allow her to sleep lightly, begs her brain to attune itself to the slightest of sounds. Then, she sleeps.

A thump. Light. Another thump, this one with a scrape of gravel at the end of it, as if someone has jumped off a curb and landed on asphalt sprinkled with a thin layer of gravel. Saoirse stirs. Her hands smart from the torn calluses she suffered while wielding the flashlight as a shovel, and the muscles in her arms and neck creak like rusty hinges. She sits up fast and finds Emmit staring at her from several feet away. She prays his lantern won’t illuminate the dirt on her arms or stains on the fabric of the thin white dress.

Emmit holds up a silver bucket, then walks it to the opposite wall. Saoirse’s cheeks burn with indignation despite how badly she needs to relieve her bladder. Emmit walks toward her again, but passes her on the blanket, and heads toward what Saoirse thinks of as the northern tip of the catacomb, despite having no way of knowing north from south in this underground prison. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he says, and Saoirse hates herself for the gratitude she feels as she hurries to the bucket. When she’s done, she returns to the blanket. Emmit meets her there.

He wipes her cheek, then her brow, and Saoirse waits for the accusation. But none comes. He kisses her, squeezes her shoulder, then lowers himself to the blanket, pushing her down along with him.

“Your mother sent you a text,” he says, and it hits Saoirse only now that Emmit has her phone. That she told him, once upon a time, how most of her communication with her parents consists of brief check-ins via text. That he knows her transcendentalist friends don’t carry cell phones. And that Saoirse rarely—if ever—posts on social media. Shards of dread crystallize in her stomach like stalagmites.

“She’s sent you a lot of texts, actually,” Emmit clarifies.

“What did you say to her?”

“I pretended I was you, of course, and that I was fine. Still seeing the new boyfriend. Still writing. She sounded happy for you. She sounds like a very nice woman. I’d like to meet her someday.”

“About that,” Saoirse starts, knowing she must choose her next words very carefully. “You’re smart, Emmit. And you’re not delusional. You must know you can’t keep me down here forever. The texts will only appease my family for so long. My mom, my friends, the landlord when my rent’s past due ... someone will come looking for me.”

He waves a hand. “I’ll pay your rent.”

She holds his gaze, careful to avoid staring at the lantern, not wanting to compromise her vision for even a second. “That’s not the point. You know this arrangement can’t go on forever.” Emmit looks thoughtful, and Saoirse takes this as a sign to push forward. “And what if the new novel is everything your editor hoped for in a follow-up to Vulture Eyes? Are you going to risk losing that momentum by leaving me to die down here? Or is your plan to bring me back up into the world as if nothing happened and continue our relationship there?

“And if that is the case,” Saoirse says, unable to stop now, her voice rising in volume, “why wait? Why not go back to the way things were right now? I’ll stay at 88 Benefit Street. You could even move in with me.” She forces a smile as she rattles off one lie after another. She needs him to believe her. She needs to get out of this tomb. Then, she can call the police. Run screaming down the street. Get as far away from Emmit as possible.

Emmit is studying her. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t know what I’m going to do long term. But I don’t think it will matter.”

The air in Saoirse’s lungs disappears. “What do you mean?”

“The exact number is debated, but it took Poe somewhere around one hundred and fifty works to achieve literary greatness. Sixty-five poems, nine essays, a single novel, a handful of novellas, one play, and seventy short stories. I figure I can keep you here long enough to create a similar body of work.”

Saoirse’s brain stutters. He aims to keep me down here until he’s written enough fiction to support an entire career? Her breath threatens to choke her, and she starts inhaling in little gasps. Her fear is so all-consuming, she feels sick, the adrenaline pumping through her muscles so heightened that she is nauseated. Her mouth fills with saliva. White dots of light fall at the edges of her vision.

But despite the fear and the nausea, the wild panic at needing to run but having nowhere to go, one emotion rises above everything, one blazing, undeniable reality that turns the adrenaline into fire and her spotty vision into clarity. Anger. Anger so pure and all-consuming, Saoirse could smash every inch of time-hardened dirt in this catacomb to powder.

Careful, Jonathan warns. Getting angry with me only made me resent you.

A bubble of laughter escapes Saoirse’s throat. God forbid we upset the man who plans to kill me.

Emmit’s eyes narrow. “What’s so funny?” His tone is inquisitive, as if they’re back in the lounge the night of the rainstorm, sharing secrets.

Last chance to keep your mouth shut, Jonathan warns.

Saoirse cocks her head at Emmit. “You know it doesn’t work like that, right?”

“Doesn’t work like what?”

“Life. Literature. The world. You can’t churn out fiction similar to Poe’s in size, theme, subject matter, whatever, and expect to achieve a similar reception. It’s madness.” Something occurs to her, and she stares harder at Emmit, amazed. “You haven’t just been trying to churn out work like Poe’s, have you? You’ve tried to become him . That’s what Mia was hinting at. Your MFA student. Josephine Martin. She knew you were Willem Thomas. You changed your name. You took on Poe’s bio as your own.”

Emmit’s eyes flash with something dangerous. She shouldn’t have mentioned Josephine. But, in her rage, she wants to hurt him. Even if it’s just the smallest fraction of the amount he’s hurt her.

“As for the work, it’s not just that we live in a different world from the one in which Poe sold ‘The Raven’ to the Evening Mirror , and nevermore was on the lips of every man, woman, and child in the country. Not just that anyone with a cell phone and a self-published novel can become a sensation via BookTok. It’s that, when it comes right down to it, you’re not as talented as Edgar Allan Poe.” She can’t be sure, not in the lantern light, but she thinks Emmit’s face has gone pale.

“You may have won a Pulitzer, but in a few years, no one will remember your name or your work. You’ll be nothing.” She laughs at the irony of what she’s about to say. “Emmit Powell, nevermore.”

She steels herself for his rage, maybe even his violence. What she does not expect is the look of appreciation, almost fascination, on his face.

“This is why I love you,” he says, and Saoirse feels herself deflate. “This is why I need you. It’s not your imprisonment in a catacomb that’s interesting; it’s how you react to it, how you are dealing with the trauma. Your view of the world is unparalleled.”

Emmit’s mouth tics, jumping into a half smile once, twice, three times. “ You are all I need to write great things. If I cannot derive inspiration from your connection to Sarah, from our residual haunting across the centuries, I will find it in other ways. If I can’t have your love, I will take your fear.”

Saoirse’s body goes cold. She wills herself not to cry. “I won’t give you that either,” she says. But inside, her body pulses with terror as thick as sludge.

Emmit throws his head back and laughs. “Of course you will. Poe’s work is timeless not because of its subject matter—dead girls, plagues, and evil cats are a dime a dozen in horror fiction—but because of the way he writes about these things. His exploration of death, its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, mourning lost love ... I can explore these things too. With you. You will be my muse, whether you like it or not. And down here, no one can hear you scream.”

Emmit reaches out and caresses her cheek. “Oh, saintly soul that should have been thy bride, you have death upon your eyes.” Saoirse jerks away, and he laughs again. “The death of a beautiful woman really is the most poetical topic in the world.” He shakes his head. “I wish I could say you’ll enjoy what’s in store.”

He reaches in his pocket and produces the bottle of chloroform and a rumpled rag like a magician. “When it’s over,” he says solemnly, “I’ll compose the most beautiful of burial rites. An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young.”

Saoirse scrambles to her feet, but Emmit grabs her by the hair. Pain burns along her scalp, but she pulls against his grip. In an instant, the chemical-soaked rag is pressed to her face.

“A dirge for you, Saoirse,” Emmit breathes into her ear. “No longer my Sarah, but my Lenore. My Ligeia. My Annabel Lee.”

Saoirse’s heart stutters. The smell of chloroform engulfs her. The sounds in the catacombs devolve to the pull of a night-tide. The wind in the clouds. The moon in a dream.

And Saoirse slips down, down, down. Farther down than she’s ever been. As close to death as a Sabbath song. As close as an atom forged in a star.

Into her kingdom by the sea.